So I finally thought I found a manga that made time travel romance compelling with interesting, innovating concepts until the Mangaka just went off the deep end with the last few chapters.
Rinko being destined to die every time she falls in love with A-Chan feels like such a big exposition dump at the end that wasn’t foreshadowed at all, completely irreverent and dumped on us without warning. It’s very unsatisfying and cheat-y to have a character built up to be clearly dislikeable and a story revolving around a protagonist getting over their love for that scummy person, only for it to be revealed in the final chapters that: “Oops. She was actually an upstanding young woman all along, just because of this extremely important supernatural phenomenon we forgot to mention at the very end.”
The children of A-Chan have always been a way for our protagonist to move forwards in my opinion, to stop seeing her former lover in her children, accepting who they are themselves, and discarding her past to face the future. Instead, we get a weird hybrid of feelings where she DOES stop seeing the children for their mothers, but DOESN’T lose her love for A-Chan. Where is the character development? Where is the moral struggle at the end of 10 chapters of random BS? What has changed in Rinko from the start to the finish?
I’m not even going to touch on the ‘cuck’ aspect of this ending, because the fact that Rinko essentially tells A-Chan to marry and have children with a man she doesn’t love, knowing he’ll be forced to die, just because she loves their children so much. Shijou (best girl fr) clearly being hinted to being attracted to a thirteen year old Koharu as an adult office worker is just…really, really strange. Tropes with alternate dimensions with alternate lovers will always lead to some sort of heartbreak as people that get together in this timeline don’t in the next, and I think that’s part of what makes it so impactful. Why the Mangaka felt the need to tie every single ‘loose end’ (in such a shitty way too) I don’t understand. The two sisters being hinted to fall in love is weird too.
The payoff of this ending is just really mid. We get ONE whole panels hinting at Rinko and A-chan’s future relationship after ten chapters. And anyways, won’t Rinko just end up…dying again?